Evercore Has Gone Downhill
Current 2nd Year Associate in M&A @ Evercore NY (ignore flair, messed up my settings when creating throwaway account). Was an A2A promote and have seen things go downhill gradually over the past few years.
-
Mass exodus of seniors in the past 2 years has made culture go to shit. Especially exaggerated by COVID.
-
Lots of turnover across 4 of our teams at the mid/senior level with tons of bankers going to BBs (which they would never have fathomed before COVID due to the politics there), CVP or exiting the industry all together.
-
Large influx of laterals from mid-tier BB (Citi, Bofa, Barclays, CS) bankers in the last 18 months have shifted culture. Lots of deal peddling by these people; deal sizes have gone down and volume has gone up. In some teams, more than 50% of the team at the mid/senior level only joined recently.
-
Quality of interns has gone downhill. I'm not sure if it was because of COVID/remote interviews or because class sizes have become so bloated. EVR is trying to expand, so selectivity and therefore quality of interns is no longer what it used to be .
-
Exits are not as good as they used to be. Class sizes are so big now that we've essentially gotten diluted and I've noticed that analysts are no longer getting insane levels of love from HHs.
Evercore is just no longer "it" and its reputation inflates what it actually is now. Sure it's still a good place to work with comp very very high, but that's pretty much all that it has going. Few cool deals here and there but it seems like the focus is now on volume. Culture has just been horrible since COVID started... and I sincerely regret going A2A.
Hoping changes can be made moving forward.
I don't want to be cocky as I consider myself very lucky, but as an intern this summer, I had higher expectation for quality of people
Recently lateraled and feel the same way. I’ve met the sharpest people at PJT, Centerview, and Perella personally. Goldman has sharp folks too.
What advice would you give to a first year just starting out here? Sadly this post is confirming some suspicions I had from my first impressions so far, I but really want to make the best of the experience. Thanks for confirming for me that A2A is out of the question now, though.
OP here:
I mean obviously start off with a positive attitude because your experience may be widely different depending on group and from mine. I'd say be careful with how you present yourself in front of the laterals. Idk why, but for some reason, these ex-bofa/citi/barclays Associates and VPs operate like they have a chip on their shoulders and that they have something to prove. Like dude, I don't care where you came from, just be a good colleague/boss and don't make things more difficult than it has to be because you're insecure about the "prestige" of your previous job lmao
This worries me for next summer, would you say this is just for EVR NY specifically, or does it apply to EVR Menlo as well?
Menlo is still alright culturally right now but it’s going in the same direction. Tons of mid BB exodus fluff coming in this summer with key players leaving/clearly gearing up to go. I’d say this side of the table has a good 3 years left in it, hours always been bad though so that’s not new.
Did not mean to offend anyone. Deleted what I said. I just don't think the quality of junior talent that EVR recruits is there anymore.
I love how the assumption on this board is that "diversity" candidates are lower quality. Mediocre people have been coasting into prestigious shops for decades
exactly, as if there is no possibility that you are smart and qualified because you aren’t white or a man ..
For what it’s worth, even their energy team has lost some steam over the past couple of years - some upper-level departures coupled with a lack of balance sheet seems to be hurting them. Still the sweatshop it was before, just with fewer deals and more pitches going around.
The Houston team has fared particularly bad. It's a shell of what is was in its heyday.
Heard the analysts are no good also, making it tough on at least mid-level.
Thats what they get for changing their logo every 2 days
Can say the same thing about PJT M&A - minus the point about senior exodus. PJT has just been hiring more geriatric seniors who sit on their ass and do nothing while getting paid a nice $10mil, all while analysts get cranked by the week's new lateral Director from CS / BofA trying to make a name for themself by leading the efforts to pitch a $75mm niche Utilities or Insurance capital raise. Probably explains why all but 1 of our Class of 2019 Associates left the firm before being up for VP promote...
Much like EVR RX, PJT RSSG has done a great job of keeping a small, quality team with top-tier deal reps. On the M&A side, though, it just seems to be a bloodbath for shitty deals and "client relationship building" at the expense of quality.
Have to push back on this a bit:
1. What do you expect those guys to do? Sit on their ass and do nothing? Company’s are focusing on their own operational issues and shoring up balance sheets. They’re new and have to demonstrate an ability to produce. Plus the fact that in the coming downturn/ layoffs they’ll be the first to go if they don’t. Understand that these are not the transactions you want to be working on but fees are fees.
2. What OP is describing at EVR in terms of a volume push has not been seen at PJT. YTD EVR has done $70bn in US M&A on 90 deals = $770mm avg. deal size. Everyone has to move down market in a downturn, however PJT and CVP have avg. deal sizes of 1.5bn and 2bn so far this year
3. Peope leave banking. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have the quasi-industrial campus recruiting mechanism. Did they leave to go do banking elsewhere? If so, yes likely a sign of deteriorating culture. If not, then clearly they just wanted out of IB.
OP, its not just Evercore that is going downhill, INVESTMENT BANKING is going downhill.
I'm at a top BB. We had a really horrible recruiting class this year. Feedback from teams was we were not excited about really any of the candidates this year but it was all we had so we had to give offers.
1. Our HR teams have stopped letting us recruit specifically from top targets and have forced us to meddle with random state schools across the USA which has diluted quality. Specific guidance was that we are not allowed all top ivies, we need "diversity" in the sense of school quality. Most importantly however, all the negative press of banking during COVID really nuked the desire for college students to join the industry leaving only the hardest of the hardos to recruit, or mediocre "strivers" who are willing to work 100hr weeks since their only other options are something crappy like Northwestern Mutual or big4 audit. Everyone else is going tech/consulting/straight to buyside.
2. All the top tier amazing/friendly people left the firm during COVID to the buyside, corporate roles, or they retired, started small businesses, went back to school etc. Covid was a time of deep introspection for the industry and anyone who is well adjusted, confident, not neurotic, doesn't have anxiety issues, and doesn't need to prove something decided banking was really not a great thing to be a part of. The people who remained after the 2020-21 exodus are all neurotic, anxious, depressed, and afraid of change.
3. Since so many people left, we had to lateral in people not only from bad quality IB firms, but people completely outside IB (transaction services, corp dev etc). Whole industry had to do this, not just my firm. Quality dropped.
In less than a decade I wouldn't be surpised if IB is looked at by college students like kids viewed big4 at my school when I was in college.
This sounds like 100% GS based on what I've heard from both junior and senior alum there. Heard HR pushed hard to screw up the recruiting process this year.
Honestly could be any of the top BBs. Networked heavily with all 3 from a top target and didn’t get superday with JPM (hirevue->super) or MS (might be a first round in between). The worst part is I didn’t even get a fucking hirevue from GS, and that sentiment was shared with a bunch of other non-diverse guys I studied technicals with.
Noticed this as a summer last year at a top gs group and half the people were from random bumfuck liberal arts colleges. I wouldn’t care if their insecurity didn’t ooze out in every interaction they had or snide joke about me going to a top HYPSM. Made it hard to want to stick around
Sounds like you're a little insecure that people from "random bumfuck" liberal arts colleges landed the same job as you. You do realize your daddy DJ D-Sol also went to aforementioned bumfuck college?
As long as IB continues to pay 20 year olds $150-200K+ (or whatever that ends up being inflation adjusted) right out of college , then it will never be viewed as Big4.
Regardless you make some great points that people all across different banks are noticing right now. The pipeline of talent coming into banks is diminishing in quality every year and the traditionally smart & high quality workers who used to enter the job are going into alternative careers like tech. That's been happening for a number of years now but the effects are really starting to show recently. Part of the issue is HR diversity BS, but there is a more fundamental issue of banks just not being a place where smart + hungry + motivated people want to spend their time these days. While the pay is attractive to most things on a relative basis, it's not anywhere close to what it was during the heyday a couple decades ago and frankly is not really worth all of the negatives that come with working in a constrained bank environment and all of the low IQ types around.
The quality of laterals coming in during the COVID period has been horrible and everyone has noticed. Every firm had to reach much lower in quality because of the high turnover and need for bodies, and the results are pretty much as expected. Now that things have cooled down, expect a lot of these people to get pushed out either indirectly (low bonus) or directly (losing their jobs unfortunately)
What will end up happening in the long run? Absent some major structural shift like banks paying people a bigger % of the deal fees and higher comp like the 'old days' , you are just going to progressively see lower and lower quality people enter the job over time. Quality of advice will go down, dumber / less insightful types running around, more people who don't know what they are doing, etc. IB isn't some super essential job , so it's not like there will be some major societal implications to this
Pardon my ignorance here, but why exactly is a volume shop necessarily a bad thing? I can understand that it’s probably ideal to work on the big-name and massive deals, but does transitioning to volume truly deteriorate a bank this much? I get the culture and lateral sentiment as well for Evercore and how that contributes, but I’m trying to understand the deterioration more from a deal perspective and wondering why volume shops are looked poorly upon cause isn’t a name like Evercore still a top notch resume line at the end of the day?
Transitioning to the numbers game of volume means significantly increased busy body work and trails that ultimately lead to dead ends. More boiling the ocean and makes the analyst experience that much harder to deal with 8-12 processes per head instead of 5-6. You can’t actually pay attention, dig deep, and learn when there are too many useless projects arising.
From an analyst perspective, EVR is still a great place to be if you are optimizing for comp and exits. Heard the latest class did extraordinarily well in terms of absolute placement (not per capita).
Can confirm on exits, still the best place to be for buyside exits. Seniors are very supportive and will make calls and give you time off during recruiting which cannot be said for other places like GS or CVP.
This thread has it all, many excuses. It's either laterals from mid-tier BBs, diversity, COVID, deal volume, state schools, non-targets, liberal arts schools, laterals from so called "bad quality IB firms", depression, fear of change, Jefferies, the EVR logo, Houston, you name it.
You people should stop pontificating and start enjoying the EVR compensation that you went there for in silence. No one is fooled by the idea that you went to what was otherwise a farmer's bank just a few years ago for its great brand, culture, smart people and great exits. We all know where the smartest people who are willing to take a pay cut go. It's rarely EVR.